The AppExchange Product I Wish Existed When I Started My Sourdough Business

A dream hits reality and a simple idea that I wish ISV offered.

When you start a business—any business—it begins with that delicious, naive clarity.

For me, it was sourdough.

There’s this sparkle-in-the-eyes phase where you believe that if you can make something good—a product people love—everything else will fall into place. I know because I lived that phase. I lived it while perfecting baking times, labeling boxes, doing local deliveries, and making spreadsheets of flour costs the way normal people make shopping lists.

And in those early days, I also believed something else:
If I was going to build a real business, it needed to start on Salesforce.

I mean, why not? I worked at Salesforce. I knew its power. If I could set up Craft Sourdough “the right way” from Day 1—with objects and flows and product bundles and proper pricing structures—I’d be ready to scale into an empire of artisan loaves shipped nationwide.

Well…

Reality Arrives

It took about three days to realize something important:

Salesforce is not a starter home.

Not for small e-commerce vendors. Not when you're doing every job: baker, accountant, marketer, dishwasher, fulfillment center, and customer service rep who says, “Sorry, your order shipped on the wrong date—I’ll refund you.”

Salesforce wasn’t too big conceptually—it was too big operationally. Too many moving parts, too many decisions, too much configuration. Yes, it’s the world’s #1 CRM. But it’s the world’s #1 CRM for companies with teams, with processes, with architects who wake up thinking about data models—not bakers who wake up thinking about levain percentage.

In the end, I discovered that Shopify handled everything I needed—simple order management, checkout, shipping, discount codes, and customer tracking.
And that was that.

But here’s the part that stuck with me:

It Didn't Have to Be So Hard.

I needed a guide.

A little bit of hand-holding.

A resource—not from Salesforce, but from a smart, motivated ISV partner—who understood that tiny e-commerce businesses don’t actually need a CRM first. They need to understand:

• How do I price my products sustainably?
• How do subscription models affect margins?
• How should I think about versioning and SKU structures if I eventually graduate to Salesforce?

And then, once I figured that out:

• How do I actually create a Salesforce price book with the right products, versions, descriptions, and fields that match the realities what I need to make it real.

That’s the AppExchange product I wish had existed.

And honestly?
It’s the AppExchange product an ISV partner should absolutely build today.

What this ISV Partner Should Offer

A Pricing Strategy Sandbox for Beginners

Not a calculator. Not a dashboard.
An AI thinking tool that walks new entrepreneurs through questions like:

• What are your cost drivers? (Ingredients, materials, packaging, shipping, labor)
• Are you selling digital, physical, subscription, or hybrid?
• What tier models might make sense for your growth?
• What does competitive pricing look like in your category?
• What margin floor is sustainable?
• How do discounts, free shipping, or bundles affect long-term health?

This doesn’t exist anywhere. It should.

This alone is worth money. But it gets better.

Automatically Generates a Salesforce-Ready Pricing Structure

Once the user has played with their pricing strategy and made decisions:

• Products
• Product versions
• SKU naming conventions
• Pricing tiers
• Subscription metadata
• One-time vs. recurring fees
• Packaging costs vs. product costs

The tool would export a Salesforce-ready structure the user can import into a:

• Standard Price Book
• Custom Price Book
• Product object model

Along with recommended field values and—this is the key—contextual tooltips.

Tooltips Written Specifically for New E-Commerce Companies

These tooltips wouldn’t sound like generic system help text. They would say things like:

“Product Code:
Use short, human-readable identifiers. For example: SOURDOUGH-CLASSIC-LOAF instead of a SKU number. This makes it easier to locate products manually when you’re fulfilling orders yourself.”

“Recurring Price:
For subscription models (weekly bread boxes, digital memberships, coffee-of-the-month), enter your per-period price here. If you're unsure, benchmark based on your cost-per-unit plus target margin.”

This is the human layer that’s missing everywhere.

Looking Back

I believed Salesforce was the right starting point because I wanted to build something big, something durable. But in the chaos of early entrepreneurship—flour costs, Shopify orders, family, full-time job—I discovered that what I really needed was not a CRM.

I needed a partner.

Someone who understood e-commerce, Salesforce, pricing, and the sheer overwhelm of trying to do everything at once.

No one built that product.

But someone absolutely should.